Transcript of Oral History Interview with Mary Vogel

Oral history interviews of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project

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Version 3 August 20, 2018

Mary Vogel Narrator

Kim Heikkila Interviewer

April 12, 2018 Minneapolis, MN

Mary Vogel -MV Kim Heikkila -KH

KH: This is an interview for the Minnesota Historical Society’s Minnesota in the Vietnam War Era Oral History Project. It is Thursday, April 12, 2018, and I’m here with Mary Vogel in her office at the University of Minnesota [University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN]. My name is Kim Heikkila. Today I’ll be talking to Mary about her role in the anti-Vietnam War movement and more specifically her work in the presidential campaign for Senator Eugene McCarthy [Eugene Joseph McCarthy (1916-2005)]. So thank you, Mary, for being willing to talk about these years and experiences with us.

So I would like to start, even though I just said it, by asking you to state and spell your name and then maybe indicate the name that you were known by during that time.

MV: My name is Mary Vogel. Vogel is spelled V-o-g-e-l. In 1967 and 1968, I was Mary Heffernan, H-e-f-f-e-r-n-a-n.

KH: And when and where were you born?

MV: I was born in Red Wing [Red Wing, MN] in 1940.

KH: Okay, and how do you identify yourself racially and/or ethnically.

MV: I’m white and I have a German and British Isles ancestry, with a little bit of Scandinavian.

KH: And I indicated a bit of this in my introduction but if you could just identify your primary role in the antiwar movement and the McCarthy campaign.

MV: I was a member of the peace movement slash antiwar movement in the sixties and in 1967, I was asked to be the only paid staff person for the McCarthy for President campaign in Minnesota.

KH: Okay, and what are you doing now?

MV: Now, I’m part-time. I’m at the University of Minnesota. For decades I ran a research and outreach center called Center for Changing Landscapes [Center for Changing Landscapes, 115 Green Hall, University of Minnesota, 1530 Cleveland Avenue North, St. Paul, MN], worked with communities about creating sustainable futures for them and now I’m associated with the Minnesota Design Center [Minnesota Design Center, 89 Church Street S.E., 1 Rapson Hall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN] and doing the same thing also.

KH: All right, great. We were talking a little bit before the recording started so I will revisit some of what we said already. I know you have about an hour, or a little bit less at this point, so we’ll just keep an eye on the clock and make sure you’re out by—

MV: If it goes longer it will be okay. I can call. We’ll have to stop.

KH: Okay, all right. Okay, if you can start then by just telling me a little bit about your family background. Was your family politically active when you were a child?

MV: My father was a lawyer and my mother was an art teacher and a community activist. Mother and Dad really were people who really transformed the community that they were in, working with others. And Mother used art as a vehicle for community work. If the highway department was coming through and destroying some historic buildings, she had classes paint them and then create more awareness of the value of historic structures in Red Wing. My father was very, very interested in the Mississippi River. The harbor is named after him now; [he was] very active in that sphere. He also represented a lot of Indians from Prairie Island [Prairie Island Indian Community, Goodhue County, MN] as a lawyer.

My mother used her visualization techniques to diagram and illustrate community processes so people could understand the planning commission’s process. She was on the planning commission for a number of years. She also was a catalyst for starting many things like the Red Wing Art Association, the Environmental Learning Center and she did that in partnership with very robust civic partners in Red Wing. But she was the creative sparkplug. She was a catalyst for many things.

KH: Interesting. And did you have siblings?

MV: I have three brothers.

KH: Older? Younger?

MV: One older; two younger.

KH: So you’re second of four?

MV: Right.

KH: Okay. What kinds of values were important to your family when you were growing up?

MV: I think a sense of community was very important. My mother came to Red Wing during the Depression to establish the art department in the high school and one of the values that she had was that it was very important that everybody went to the same school, high school. So you had people on welfare or Indians and we didn’t have a lot of racial disparity; we just had, you know, Indians, but people of considerable means, all together. And she thought that that was very important and my father was very respectful of everybody. And both of them were valued members of the community and they valued being in the community.

KH: And did they adhere to or follow any particular political party?

MV: Both of them were originally Republicans. My mother morphed into a Democrat later and my father originally was a Democrat who, when FDR [US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt Sr. (1882-1945)] tried to pack the Supreme Court, he switched parties. As a lawyer he was offended.

KH: Okay, that makes some sense I guess. And what about religion? Was religion important to your family?

MV: We were Catholics. My mother converted to Catholicism. She grew up in a not as strongly identified Protestant as—she would go to the church that she liked the music in. She was a person who—she converted to Catholicism because she thought it was important that a family be together and that Catholicism was quite important to my father, but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve.

KH: Was there a tradition of military service in your family?

MV: My father was too young to be in World War I and too old to be—World War I, I’m sorry—and too old to be in World War II, but he served in the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard Auxiliary.

KH: Did you have uncles or cousins or any other—?

MV: My uncle served in the navy in the Pacific during World War II.

KH: Okay. And was—whether it was your father’s service in the Coast Guard Auxiliary or your uncle’s in World War II—was there a family awareness of that kind of service? Was it a proud tradition or was it—?

MV: Well, this was what you do. I mean, my uncle—I only had one uncle because my father was an only child and my mother had one brother and my uncle was very active in Minneapolis in all kinds of things; both of them were dynamos and transformed the communities that they lived in. So serving in the military was not a crowning achievement. I mean, when my uncle died, they did have the navy insignia among all the other kinds of things that he did. It wasn’t central to their identity or to the culture in our family.

KH: Okay. What high school did you go to?

MV: I went to Red Wing High School.

KH: And what year did you graduate?

MV: Nineteen fifty-eight.

KH: So when you were growing up and were in high school, were you aware of the civil rights movement that was kind of bubbling to the surface and getting some national attention by that time?

MV: Not very much, but I was—if you were to describe me and what has been my life work, I can say that I have been a catalyst for many things. So, for example, when I was eleven, [bell rings] I thought the Cannon River was a good river for canoeing in and so I asked the editor of the local paper, and my younger brother went with me, and we took him out on a canoe trip on the Cannon River and then he wrote a piece about it. And that was the start of the Cannon River as [recreational asset that was perceived as such by the community].

When I was fifteen, we didn’t have anything to do in the summertime as adolescents, but we had this wonderful auditorium, the Sheldon Memorial Auditorium [now Sheldon Theatre, 443 West Third Street, Red Wing, MN], which was used as a movie theater. And so I thought it would be fun if we could put on a play in the summertime so the first time I ever baked a cake or cooked anything really—I was fifteen; it was a yellow cake—I invited five men, leaders of the community [bell rings] to my house for coffee and cake and pitched them the idea of starting a theater company for the kids in the summertime. And like the person who owned the shoe factory; and the person who owned the tannery; and a couple others—all men—my father was included. And everybody wrote out a check for a hundred dollars and we had five hundred dollars and we started a theater.

KH: When you were fifteen?

MV: When I was fifteen. When I was nineteen, at the university—the university was central in talking about central values, both my mother and my father went to the university; both of them had gone to graduate school here; they—it was a transformative and important part of their life. The university is key to what both of them became. And I used to come up—mother used to bring me up to the University on many occasions. The University used to have lectures at eleven o’clock on Thursday mornings at Northrup Auditorium. They would have people like Frank Lloyd Wright [Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)] and my mother would bring me up when I was a kid.

So when I was here at the university as an undergraduate—it was important to go to a public university, my parents saw that as an important value—Tyrone Guthrie [Sir William Tyrone Guthrie (1900-1971)] came here and talked about wanting to establish a theater in a city in the United States. And afterwards I went backstage because he had said it would be shame if Minnesota wasn’t, you know, in the competition to compete for getting the Guthrie Theater. So I

went backstage and said, “Can I help?” And the theater department, “Doc” Whiting [Dr. Frank M. “Doc” Whiting (1908-1996)], said, “Come to my office tomorrow at eleven o’clock.”

So I did—I came to his office. I came in and closed the door and he said that Tyrone Guthrie wants to have a relationship with an institution of higher learning—he’s had all these other awards—but he wants the validation and the cachet of being associated with an institution of higher education. And I’m very enthusiastic about it. But President James L. Morrill [James Lewis Morrill (1891-1979)] said no [bell rings] and has forbidden me to do anything to get— encourage Tyrone Guthrie because the university is not going to have anything to do with the theater.

And I said, “Well, okay, then I guess I can organize the campus,” which I did, Students for Guthrie, and we had faculty members, too. And one of my favorite stories about the effort was Bob Holt [Robert T. Holt], was a political science professor and Art Ballet [Arthur Ballet (1925- 2012)], who was kind of a—well, he was a character and a little paranoid; he was a professor of theater, and an English a psychology professor, asked me to come for lunch at the Campus Club [Campus Club, 300 Washington Avenue Southeast, Coffman Memorial Union, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN] to plot strategy. It was the first time I’d ever been in the Campus Club, so we’re sitting down at the table talking about how we are going to, you know, how they are going to organize the faculty and I’m going to organize the students since I’d already started organizing the students—they had contacted me. And President Morrill comes in and sits down at the next table. (laughter)

But we organized, Students for Guthrie, and [turned the University’s position from one of opposition to support] so when Tyrone Guthrie came there was a relationship between the university’s theater department and the Guthrie which included Guthrie scholars. That relationship is long gone, [but it was crucial to getting the theater located in Minneapolis]. When Tyrone Guthrie came and there was the welcoming reception, [Doc Whiting saw to it that] I was his lunch partner.

KH: Wow.

MV: And then, of course, when it—after the theater was built, on opening night, my mother and I went. I recently went through my mother’s things—she was, as I say, a super civically engaged person—and I found the two tickets from opening night. And they asked her—they didn’t ask me—but they asked her to serve on the board. And Guthrie’s vision was to have the theater on the banks of the Mississippi River but it was built at the Walker [Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN] because the Walker had land that was available. [Thomas Barlow Walker (1840-1928)], you know, and John Cowles Jr. [John Cowles Jr. (1919-2012)] and Louis Zelle [Louis N. Zelle (1925-2003)] were given the job of raising money for the building; Walker had the land.

So it pleases me now to go to the Guthrie [now Guthrie Theater, 818 South Second Street, Minneapolis, MN] on the banks of the river because Tyrone Guthrie would have liked that; that’s what he wanted. And, of course, the [Guthrie Theater was the catalyst that created a whole new

cultural scene in the Twin Cities] — it transformed this community into a theater community; now we have all these theaters.

So I also worked as a social worker, connecting people that had been institutionalized who were suffering from schizophrenia and suffered from the institutionalization as much or more than their mental illness.

[I have been a catalyst for a number of things.]

When I got the first money for the Women’s Advocates, public money—they had private money and I helped design it when I was in architecture school. I wasn’t an architect yet, so I had worked with a professor here, Lee Tollefson. We designed Women’s Advocates [Women’s Advocates, 588 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN]. So I’ve had this—and I keep doing this, and I’m still doing this, in other ways—using design now as a way of working with community. So that’s what I do. I guess I would say I’m a catalyst as were my mother and my father.

KH: I was going to say it sounds like you follow very much in your parents’ footsteps, in being a catalyst and in being attuned to art.

MV: Well creative, creativity.

KH: And so was your degree then in social work?

MV: No, my degree was in intellectual history and English literature and humanities. Then I came back to architecture school after all this, after 1968, later. Got my architecture degree. I was not encouraged to be an architect—I was a good student, and they had special classes for me in Red Wing and stuff, but as a woman, I wasn’t—I was encouraged by my mother, but I wasn’t encouraged by anybody else to be an architect.

KH: By like professors, teachers?

MV: Yeah, so I just came back and did that after. So that’s me.

KH: And when did you finish your bachelor’s degree at the “U?”

MV: In the early sixties.

KH: In the early sixties. Okay, so let’s turn now towards the war. When did you first become aware of what was going on with the United States’ involvement in Vietnam?

MV: Middle sixties, you know, well, I mean, it was an issue in the Kennedy [US President John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy (1917-1963)] era, you know, but it just kind of kept growing. And one of the things that distinguished it from other discussions, previous discussions, I remember the Korean War—was that you had this technocrat who had—it was part of the whole sweeping the culture that you could use numbers to make decisions. And I think Ken Burns did a good job in pointing that out in his series [The Vietnam War: A film by Ken Burns & Lynn

Novick, first aired, PBS, September 2017]. I didn’t watch the whole series. I couldn’t. It was too hard for me, some of it, just too hard. And it’s still hard to talk about it.

KH: So you mentioned Kennedy. Was Kennedy your candidate of choice? Well, so ’58, ’49,’50—you could vote then, right? In that election? You were already twenty-one.

MV: I was twenty-one in ’61.

KH: So you just missed it. But given that your family was Catholic, was Kennedy—who was Kennedy to your family or to you?

MV: Kennedy was a hero to my husband who identified—he was half German and half Irish just like McCarthy, but had an Irish last name and identified as Irish; didn’t identify as German and he was Catholic. He was very much a Kennedy person. There was a lot of excitement about having a Catholic as a president by Catholics. I was more—I was not as political—I was community grounded, but not as politicized in the conventional way in 1960 and ’61. I was interested in reading about the Renaissance and reading the great thinkers of the western tradition and understanding the literary, the contribution of literature that both England the United States have made to the world. So I wasn’t political with a capital P. My husband was when I married him but I married him in ’64, so—

KH: Okay. So you were done with your bachelor’s degree?

MV: Oh, right, and working, yeah.

KH: And you were working at the mental health center?

MV: Right.

KH: Okay, and I think I read somewhere, in Alpha Smaby’s [Alpha Sunde Smaby (1910- 1991)] book [Political Upheaval: Minnesota and the Vietnam War Protest, 1987] where she had interviewed you and she said or quoted you as saying that you really became more, maybe capital P, politically involved through your husband. Is that—do you think that’s a fair reflection?

MV: Yeah, I think that that is a reflection of—that was one of his gifts to me, yes. And it was easy to do because as the war escalated and the questions escalated, Are we doing the right thing? Also in the Catholic tradition, and Catholicism, religion, played a very important role in the peace movement and the antiwar movement and the McCarthy movement and it’s very different than it is now.

KH: How so? What—?

MV: Well, you had Pope John XXIII [Pope Saint John XXIII (1881-1963)], who really created a whole milieu of social justice and concern for the world. You also had St. John’s [College of Saint Benedict, and Saint John's University, Collegeville, MN], which was the center of much—

and, of course, Gene McCarthy was from St. John’s and he, at one point, was going to be a monk—you’ve got St. John’s, which was a superstar place in the world. It was the center of the liturgical revival or movement and anyway, there was a lot of concern about the world in terms of individual responsibility, based on Catholicism.

And the people that were active in the peace movement and antiwar movement and McCarthy movement, lots of Catholics, lots of Jews, some Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists —but that was a smaller group because there were fewer of them, but an important one, and a smattering of Protestants, like Al Currier, who was the minister at Macalester [Macalester College, St. Paul, MN], but it was heavily Catholic and Jewish and Unitarians. And it was driven not by we want people to believe our religion; it was our religion says we have a responsibility to the greater good and we are morally obligated to step forward and do our part.

KH: Is that how you felt about it?

MV: Yes.

KH: Do you view this through your own Catholic–?

MV: Yes, well, it was also informed by the Second World War experience. We did not want to be good Germans and follow our leaders when they were wrong. Some of us who had German ethnicity felt that maybe stronger than others. Certainly Jews felt that responsibility, collective responsibility also. McCarthy’s Catholicism was informed a lot by German Catholic tradition, even though you don’t hear about that. And some of us have—Vogel means bird in German. It wasn’t very popular being proud of your German ethnicity during World War II and after. You didn’t really say.

KH: Yeah, so did you know—? So you get married in 1964; you’re already done with college, you’re working; the war is starting to pick up. ’64 is the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Johnson [US President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973)] finally is running as a candidate in his own right for president. What do you remember about those developments, especially with regard to what was going on in Vietnam early on in ’64?

MV: I think that a lot of us supported Johnson because of his domestic agenda because we were very concerned about the racial and the poverty situation. And once my husband graduated from law school and started practicing, he and I made a pact that he would devote a certain amount of his time, work time, representing poor black men because they were sent to prison, to jail and prison, because we didn’t have public defenders. So we were involved in that and I supported that. I wasn’t a lawyer but I earned money so he could spend time doing that and, of course, African-American men were being sent disproportionately to the war and so, you know, all of these things were interconnected. I have a view of life, anyway, that, you know, life is a web. It isn’t like there’s one kind of—

KH: So did you know anybody who was drafted?

MV: I knew children [of friends] who were drafted. I didn’t have a lot of intimate friends who were drafted but we knew what was going on. There were, my classmates in high school, were being drafted.

KH: What about your brothers?

MV: No. My older brother had polio and would not qualify.

KH: So the draft didn’t come into your family directly?

MV: Personally, no, nor my cousins’. You know, people of privilege weren’t drafted sometimes. You could be in college or—

KH: You could get an occupational deferment and just rolled right through.

MV: It was obvious that there were different standards for different groups and that was another horrific—I mean, who would think, Holy cats! This is awful.

KH: So tell me a little bit then about how you become, yourself, become more involved in Minnesota DFL politics.

MV: I wasn’t involved in Minnesota DFL politics until I was involved—first I was involved with the peace movement and the antiwar movement. McCarthy’s gift that has been underplayed I think in a lot of sources, is that there were a lot of us who were against the war and were eager to do something but we didn’t have draft cards to burn; we weren’t candidates to flee to Canada to avoid the draft. McCarthy’s great contribution to this was he said, he stood up and said, “Let us use the political—this is a government that is doing something wrong and we need to address that and use the [political system to change the] government’s actions, use the processes of politics to address that.” And I don’t think he ever had an illusion that he was going to be the president of the United States, but he came from this Benedictine tradition of moral responsibility and so he gave us a gift. You could be a grandmother and be involved. If marching in the streets with placards wasn’t your thing, you could make a contribution. So the middle class and the older people and women were empowered to make a difference in ways that were effective and appropriate.

KH: And you said that really you hadn’t been involved in DFL politics in particular until you got involved in the McCarthy campaign. You had been involved in the peace slash antiwar movement. Before I finish that question I want to ask you about the difference between calling it a peace movement and an antiwar movement.

MV: I think the peace movement really spoke to maybe some bigger issues. The antiwar movement really focused on the Vietnam War and the peace movement says, war is not the solution to these multiple problems that we have as a community, as a country and as a world.

KH: And how did you see yourself? Would you have defined yourself more as a peace movement person or an antiwar person?

MV: I guess I would define myself as being a peace person who—that the antiwar movement was one focus within—it nested within the larger context of the peace movement, you know.

KH: So you said, and this is where I started with that question, that you had been involved in the peace movement then prior to your involvement in the McCarthy campaign. What had you been doing?

MV: Well, going to meetings and writing letters and doing that kind of thing, you know, showing up for peace marches and stuff like that.

KH: So you were doing that kind of protest?

MV: Kind of thing, yeah. Not, I mean, it wasn’t the center of my life but I was a participant in it. A small part of my life in a small participation.

KH: But then you became so involved in the McCarthy campaign.

MV: Yes.

KH: Why the difference? Why a small part in the kind of protest wing of the antiwar/peace movement and then this really committed, serious, major role in the McCarthy campaign?

MV: Well, part of it had to do with the fact that the four men who became leaders of the— John Connolly [John Stevens Connolly] and Forrest Harris; Don Heffernan [Donald Heffernan (1935-2013)], my husband, Donald Heffernan, and Hopkins Holmberg. John and Don from St. Paul and Forrest and Hop, you know, we all were concerned about the war and felt that we needed to have a political strategy for it. And it was rumored that McCarthy was interested and so, you know, I mean, I knew Alpha Smaby before because she was part of the peace movement, antiwar movement. So Don and John and well, Forrest was a member of the DFL steering committee of some kind, and Hop was a DFL person. John and Don were both very interested in the DFL Party so they were more political than I was in terms of party identification and using the party as—a vehicle for [protesting the war and stopping the war] [bell rings] but I was part of the organizing effort because I had this history of being what I call a catalyst. I don’t do this stuff alone, but oftentimes, in the past, I was the person who had the creative idea, put the thing together; put the organization together and then ran it or handed it off to partners, you know, but I had this background.

KH: Yeah, the experience of the actual organizing, how you do that.

MV: Yeah, I knew how to do that.

KH: So I’m going to ask a question that I have been trying to ask everybody rather than to take it for granted. Why did you oppose the war in Vietnam?

MV: It was morally wrong.

KH: How come?

MV: Period. And we were being lied to about it and I didn’t want to be a good German. I had a moral responsibility.

KH: And how did you learn about things like the lies that the American people were being told about the war?

MV: You read newspapers; listen to television. You know, this was the first war really on television in a way; the Korean War wasn’t quite that way at all, even though we had television. So it was in your face; you had an opportunity to look at it in ways that you couldn’t in previous wars. And it wasn’t—you know, it was our war; it was a construct of an ideology: the communists are going to take over the world. It’s bullshit. If we don’t stop them in Vietnam, our country is going to be overcome. It’s not true. [bell rings] And so we had to do something. And at church we heard about it and we met people, the Catholic Church—

KH: Who were also opposed—?

MV: Oh, yes.

KH: to the war and kind of having this—?

MV: Oh, yeah, well, yeah.

KH: Did you encounter anybody in your life, whether colleagues or, you know, your neighbors, or family members who supported the war and maybe saw your opposition to it as a conflict for them? Did it affect your personal relationships?

MV: I think we tried hard to maintain relationships with people who thought differently than we and understand where they were coming from. And certainly when we first started opposing the war we were seen by large groups of people as communists or weirdos or something other— some undesirable, or just puzzlement, why are you doing this? Why are you doing this? They didn’t understand it. And when you’re trying to build a movement, you want friends—you want to build connections and understanding. You don’t want to confront them and—I don’t think, anyway.

KH: What about your parents and your siblings?

MV: They respected what I was doing. They weren’t exactly on the same wavelength, necessarily, but they respected it.

KH: So you—I think this was one of the things we started talking about before the recorder was on, but tell me then the story of how you, in particular, become so deeply involved in the McCarthy campaign here in Minnesota.

MV: Well, in the initial organizing meetings with McCarthy, with the four men and McCarthy and me; I can’t remember anybody else. But anyway, this was before he announced. This was in 1967, so part of what happened was that we had to think about, how are we going to create a structure for a campaign in Minnesota? And so Gene McCarthy after we had discussions and everything, Gene McCarthy said, “Would you run the office?” Of course, in a grassroots campaign, it’s running the campaign. You know, you’re doing it full-time and you have the four directors or co-directors who are setting policy but they’re not really running it. Because a grassroots campaign is person to person, door to door, phone call to phone call, organizing, filing and all that sort of thing. It’s not what kind of ad are we going to put on the social media, which it is now. It was going through voter lists and calling people, you know, contacting campuses and figuring out what kind of network can you make, so that’s what you did.

KH: And McCarthy asked you personally to do this?

MV: Yes, yes.

KH: Why do you think he asked you?

MV: I guess he liked what I was saying when we were talking about it. I don’t know.

KH: At this meeting with these other guys and—?

MV: Well, yeah, this ongoing conversation we were having and my suggestions or comments or whatever, but he said, would you do this, Mary? We need someone to run the office. And, you know, he had asked—he asked John and Forrest and checked me out a little bit, Don and Hop, too, you know what I’m saying, but ultimately he was the one who said, will you do this?

KH: Now, if I’m understanding and remembering this history correctly, McCarthy, I mean, he kind of rises to be the candidate for the Concerned Democrats.

MV: Right. And that (Concerned Democrats) was Alpha Smaby and Forrest Harris.

KH: Okay, and was there a national movement also? I thought I had read or saw somewhere about a national—?

MV: There were Concerned Democrats [National Conference of Concerned Democrats]. I think that, from my perspective, all of this was pretty—I wouldn’t want to say sui generis, exactly, but, you know, located kind of state by state or community by community or campus by campus. There was this sort of uprising all around and Don and I were involved in the Concerned Democrats and that’s how we met John and Hop. They were, you know—and you’ve asked me some questions about the Democratic Party, well, you know, that was—this was not the Democratic Party but people who identified as Democrats and that’s different. Do you understand?

KH: Yes, but say a little bit more about that because one of the things that struck me when I was going through Alpha Smaby’s book and some of these other materials, is how much conflict

there was in Minnesota, in the Democratic slash DFL Party at this time. So what’s the difference between kind of mainstream DFLers in Minnesota and the Concerned Democrats?

MV: Well, for many people in the Democratic Party, Hubert Humphrey [US Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. (1911-1978)] was it. He was much beloved and admired for his accomplishments. And so he had many, many loyal followers. So the Democratic Party was full of Humphrey-philes and rightly so because he was a man of accomplishment. However, he happened to be vice president to a man who was escalating the war and lying to the American people. So you had a group of people, besides the religious people that were involved in this, there were a lot of academics, a lot of academics who were questioning what was going on. So, and because Hubert Humphrey had been such a champion of the Jews—because Jews, I mean, Minneapolis was sort of the capitol of anti-Semitism for a long time—he became major of Minneapolis and, you know, he really started to turn things around and so there were a lot—he had very strong support in the Jewish community also. But there were a number of other Jews who liked Humphrey originally, but said, we’ve got to take on this war issue.

So we were left wingers, perceived as left wingers. Some of us were perceived as communists by some of the Democrats. So there was a difference. There was the willingness—the group, the Concerned Democrats, were willing to stand up and question the party in a way that the people in the party weren’t. And some of the people in the party were saying, we’re against the war, too, but we’re not going to be a part of your movement. Some of them would talk to me confidentially about it, but there was this very strong feeling that, you know, Humphrey is our leader and we’re going to be loyal to him.

KH: I think that was one of the points in Alpha Smaby’s book where she is talking about your work in, during the campaign—pardon me, (coughing) I just got something in my throat—where you were trying to reach out to people in smaller towns and you get a good response, you know, they indicate in writing or somehow that they oppose the war; they’re not pleased with what the Johnson administration is doing, but they wouldn’t vote against Humphrey by that time. So McCarthy asks you to lead the campaign—

MV: See, Humphrey built the Democratic Party. He was one of the founders of it. Jane Freeman [Jane Charlotte Shields Freeman (1921-2018)] just died and, you know Orville Freeman [Orville Lothrop Freeman (1918-2003)] and Hubert Humphrey—they were the founders of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Farmer Labor Party—they put together the Farmer Labor and the Democratic Party and they made a party so he was a founding, you know, this is like being against Thomas Jefferson [US President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)] or something. You know what I’m saying?

KH: Which makes Minnesota kind of have a very unique position and stake in this presidential race in 1968, when you have two Minnesota icons, one perhaps a greater icon by that time but—

MV: Well, different styles. I mean, Humphrey was hot and McCarthy was cool. Humphrey was connecting with people; McCarthy was intellectual, brilliant, and we learned a lot from him. He taught us about the political system.

KH: So how much contact did you have with him directly during this campaign?

MV: Well, not too much, because there are other states like New Hampshire and Wisconsin, you know. You didn’t need to have [much contact]. I mean, it was a different kind of deal. A lot of Humphrey people felt this visceral connection to Humphrey. We felt this gratitude to McCarthy for being a candidate and bringing this forward.

KH: Because he was the one, early enough on, versus Kennedy, who comes in later, who says, “Yes, I will be a candidate. I will represent this critique.”

MV: Right. McCarthy stood up alone and there is a poster showing him standing alone, you know. He stood up alone; he took it on; nobody else would. We were grateful and we learned a lot from him. He was, I thought, a very good spokesman. Now people will say, well he can’t raise the rabble like Humphrey could. Well, this was a serious business. We needed people to understand something. We couldn’t just wave the flag and say, rah, rah, rah. We’ve had plenty of that since then. We know what that is like. This was serious. Our government was wrong and we needed to understand why it was wrong and what we as citizens needed to do to fix it. What was our responsibility? What was our civic responsibility?

KH: And that leads me to ask you about something we had talked about a few minutes ago and that is one of the things that you said that a lot of the narrative about the war years and the antiwar movement has missed something and it has to do with patriotism. So do you want to say a few words about that?

MV: Yeah, we felt very patriotic. We felt that in McCarthy’s—can I read this?

KH: Yeah, it was great.

MV: In McCarthy’s First Things First: New Priorities for America, His Specific Program for the Reconciliation of a Society in Dire Crisis [First Things First: New Priorities for America, New American Library, 1968] And he starts this—in the forward he says he began writing this book in, “my hope that it would serve as more than an analysis of our domestic and foreign problems and more simply a set of policy recommendations.” But then, in chapter one, he says, “Albert Camus once expressed the hope that he would always be able to love his country without loving justice any less. ‘The true patriot,’ he said, ‘is one who loved his country not for what it was, but for what it ought to be. That,’ he wrote in one of his letters to a German friend, ‘is what separated us from you. We made demands. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth.’” That’s what this is about, was about. And McCarthy very eloquently articulated that in ways that were very important and so we were patriots [bell rings] but we were often called communists and disloyal, but we weren’t.

“There is much more at stake in this election than questions of foreign policy and war. The basic issue is whether or not we can make democracy work here for all Americans.” Gene McCarthy.

KH: And nobody else was framing it this way?

MV: Well, Senator Fulbright [US Senator James William Fulbright (1905-1995)], but he wasn’t running for president, you know, he wasn’t running for president. So the basic dynamic was that Gene McCarthy and his campaign became a vehicle for patriotically opposing the war and demanding change from our government. And it worked to the extent that LBJ didn’t run for re-election.

KH: An amazing thing.

MV: Yes, the day before April Fool’s Day—

KH: That’s right.

MV: Of course, it was, this isn’t April first, is it? Say it is really March thirty-first. No, it was jaw-dropping for everyone.

KH: Yeah, and so McCarthy declares his presidency in November of 1967, so then everything—campaign is in full swing.

MV: Then we had precinct caucuses on the fifth of March and then there was the Wisconsin Primary—

KH: Which McCarthy won.

MV: And we sent lots and lots of people. Then, of course, there was the fourth—I think that was the fourth of April. Let’s see, the fourth of April was when King [Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)] was assassinated and then the sixth of June when Kennedy [US Senator Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-1968)] was assassinated so it was really tough, really tough.

KH: Sixty-eight was a hard year.

MV: And then we went to Chicago.

KH: So, tell me a little bit about the effect on the campaign and on your attitude and the attitude of others particularly, of course, in Minnesota, who were working for McCarthy, the effect of Johnson’s withdrawal. Because now—

MV: It was Humphrey.

KH: —or very soon after, right. Now, McCarthy’s main opponent within the Party is another homegrown, you know, this icon of Minnesota Democratic politics. Was—so you said it was a jaw-dropping moment. You know, I’ve read other accounts where Concerned Democrats were elated that Johnson was out initially and then how do you have to rethink your approach when that happens?

MV: We kept going because Humphrey did not separate himself from Johnson’s foreign policy and some of us felt that it was our patriotic duty to keep the pressure on so that he could extract

himself. Some of us were accused, of course, by our friends who loved Hubert Humphrey and had visceral connections to him, personal connections, strong connections to him, felt that we were terrible, you know, traitors and all that sort of stuff, but a number of us felt like, you know, if—Johnson was a tough cookie. He was very manipulative and very tough. And so the problem was not Lyndon Johnson. The problem was the Vietnam War. After he withdrew we couldn’t say—we had to keep going.

KH: Even though that—I think some of that, the expression of the Concerned Democrats, whether here or elsewhere, was kind of a Dump Johnson movement, right? This was about dumping Johnson and now he’s dumped.

MV: Right.

KH: But as you say it was Dump Johnson because of his conduct—

MV: in the war. So we had to keep the pressure on about the war. The other, I mean, there are people to this day who say, you know, you’re terrible. I voted for Hubert Humphrey for president, but, you know, there are different ways of looking at it. As I say, we wanted to end the war. It wasn’t the Dump Johnson, you know, so we had to continue.

Another way of looking at it that is compatible with our view was that we gave Hubert Humphrey a chance to run for president that he didn’t have before. Now he had to choose how to run it and we would like him to be against the war but he didn’t do that.

KH: Because—

MV: And when Kennedy entered, you know, that was a whole other dynamic and a lot of us feel that if he had lived, he would have been elected president.

KH: You among them? Did you believe that?

MV: Yes.

KH: And do you think that would have been a good thing?

MV: Yes.

KH: How did you feel, you and your colleagues in the McCarthy camp, when—I think it was mid-March that Kennedy throws his hat in the ring, declares his candidacy?

MV: Well, we were concerned that it would split things but we had to be—we had to be the peace movement that focused on the antiwar movement that was using McCarthy as a vehicle. We were concerned about those splits about that because obviously, if you have three candidates and two of them are peace candidates and one is a war candidate, then it’s tough because it’s tough enough, because you’re asking people—you’re asking people who have kids who are in Vietnam to be against the war and some of them found that extremely difficult. And I can

understand that. I have four kids; I have three boys and a girl and I understand, you know, the need to believe in the causes that your child is enmeshed in.

KH: And I know there was among some people, some resentment at Kennedy’s late entry— that he was acting opportunistically, having let McCarthy kind of carry the weight—

MV: A lot of people feel that way and I probably felt that way at the time but we also had to keep focused on the idea that we needed to make a change and that we felt great gratitude—we weren’t going to abandon McCarthy for anything and we’re going to have to figure out—this is a new political situation; we have to figure out how to deal with it because we have to end this war.

KH: So how, if in any way, did things change? How did you make those changes after Kennedy enters the race?

MV: Well, I think that we—some of our people moved to Kennedy; some of them stayed with us and we just kept together. I mean, we were on parallel tracks. We weren’t diverging I don’t think.

KH: It is now—

MV: I’m going to call.

KH: Is that all right?

MV: Yes.

Pause in recording

KH: Okay. We are back. So [rustling papers] tell me then, you said the precinct caucuses in Minnesota were March fifth, early March? And then—what’s your recall of that?

MV: Well, and then we had all the conventions and the delegates to the convention, to the national convention, you know on the local level and all the way up. And one of the things that is important about the peace movement, antiwar movement, McCarthy campaign, is that it transformed the Democratic Party and there were all kinds of new people that came and caucused.

KH: McCarthy supporters.

MV: McCarthy peace people. And participated and many, many people then became politically active and many legislators got started. Bud Philbrook [Burnham “Bud” Philbrook]; John Tomlinson [John D. Tomlinson]; I mean, lots and lots of people and so in the seventies, early seventies, the Democratic Party took over the legislature because of this new energy that came into the party with the peace movement. And in 1966, there had been this huge Rolvaag

[MN Governor Karl Fritjof Rolvaag (1913-1990)] /Keith [Alexander MacDonald "Sandy" Keith (1928- )] fight.

And Warren Spannaus [Warren Richard Spannaus (1930-2017)], who just died, he’s a friend, was chair of the Democratic Party and at that time, we had chairman and chairwoman and he had lived through the Rolvaag/Keith thing and was personally opposed to the war, very strong Methodist, a person who—one of the finest human beings there has ever been is Warren Spannaus. And he lived John Wesley’s [John Wesley (1703-1791)], you know, do all the good you can for as many as you can for as long as you can. I don’t know if you know that quote or not, but you should. That was Warren. And he welcomed us into the party and so we didn’t feel like we were the aliens landing; we were welcomed and the energy that—and Warren held us all together and that was a tough job because Humphrey and McCarthy were different and we were a different group. So—and I think that has not been recorded or acknowledged but was very important.

And I became an active member and leader in the DFL; I became the chairwoman, because they had chairwoman, of Ramsey County and my husband was vice chair of the Fourth District and John became chair of the Fourth District so we took on—we were elected to party positions and then, because I was chair, chairwoman of the Ramsey County delegation, I was on the state executive committee along with the other district leaders from Hennepin County and Ramsey County leaders were on that committee. So then I became active in the party but so there was a lot of [new energy in the DFL] and a lot of, as I say, a lot of what happened [after 1968 to the DFL happened because of all the new people who were welcomed into the party. Many new people were elected to the legislature] because we had the majority, and we elected a governor, you know, there were all kinds of things that [were a result of the increased political activity]—

Wendy Anderson [MN Governor Wendell Richard "Wendy" Anderson (1933-2016)], who was best man and Don and my wedding—Don used to play handball with him when he was a state senator and when he ran for governor, we didn’t support him; we supported Nick Coleman [Nicholas David Coleman (1925-1981)] because Nick Coleman was part of the peace movement, and Wendy never forgave us for that. But it was important, you know, you play handball with someone once a week for years but you still have to take a stand on the war and Don Heffernan did.

KH: That was a question I was going to ask you is, you know, we’re kind of talking about some of these challenges in the campaign between Humphrey supporters and McCarthy supporters at a distance.

MV: It lasted past 1968. Also Bob Goff [Robert "Bob" Goff (1937-2017)] was part of the peace movement and antiwar movement, probably more the antiwar movement than the peace movement, and he was Nick Coleman’s, Senator Nick Coleman’s business partner. Bob was the one who said to Nick, You better be on the right side of history with this one. And then he persuaded Nick, who had gubernatorial ambitions, and he lost the nomination for governor because of his support of Gene McCarthy, lost it to Wendell Anderson. He paid a political price for it. Bob had said to Nick, “What are you going to tell your kids and your grandchildren? You

better be on the right side of history” and, of course, Bob has had a long history with the Minnesota Historical Society; you know that.

Another thing that, you know, besides the importance of giving middle class and academics and young people and old people a political focus, using the political system to bring about change, which was the most important thing that McCarthy contributed and nobody really talks about it. You know, the renewal or strengthening of the Democratic Party in Minnesota because of this has been, I think, downplayed or not acknowledged in the way that—and Warren Spannaus’ role in it has not been acknowledged. And, you know, I had never been an officer in the Democratic Party, and all of a sudden I am on state executive committee and Warren was very interested in the ideas that I contributed to the discussions and I always felt that my ideas were listened to and not discounted.

Another thing that I think has been misunderstood about the McCarthy/Humphrey situation was that a number of people who were very close to Humphrey emotionally blamed McCarthy [bell rings] and McCarthy supporters for his loss in the election. And what they say about McCarthy is that he should have endorsed him earlier and that his endorsement wasn’t strong enough. And I think that’s a misreading of history. First of all, if McCarthy had stood up on that podium in Chicago with all that strife and all this sort of stuff and put his arm around Hubert Humphrey and said, this is the man, a lot of the peace/McCarthy people wouldn’t have voted.

KH: At all?

MV: They would have felt betrayed and that by not endorsing him, McCarthy put pressure on him to separate himself from [Johnson] and Humphrey finally did. He put pressure on Humphrey to separate himself from Johnson and Johnson’s position on the war. And, you know, finally, I mean, it was getting close so McCarthy did step up and give him an endorsement in October because we did have to vote for him rather than Richard Nixon [US President Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994)]—there’s no question about it. You know, we wanted to send a signal, but I think that Humphrey didn’t—and Humphrey’s followers—didn’t understand that the way McCarthy dealt with the situation delivered more votes from the peace movement—

KH: Do you think—?

MV: than if he had done anything else.

KH: And do you think that was specifically what McCarthy was thinking in his—?

MV: I don’t know, but I know from being on the ground and listening to people, knowing our troops—I don’t like to use the word troops, because that’s military—but knowing our group, our groups, that the worst thing that Humphrey could have gotten would have been an endorsement from Gene McCarthy at the convention or soon after.

KH: Yeah, I can see that now that you say that.

MV: McCarthy was a smart man. I’m sure he knew that but he never told me that and I didn’t ask him.

KH: But still, as you say, you know, you said this a while ago, that you thought McCarthy didn’t really think he was going to end up as president of the United States, but his goal was to stop the war.

MV: Right.

KH: And so to do that better, he had a better chance with Humphrey than with Nixon.

MV: Right.

KH: So once McCarthy is clearly out of the race, then he’s still thinking, right, that that’s what the goal was?

MV: Right, let’s move Humphrey closer to our position. McCarthy was a politician; he understood how—he understood power—he understood how it worked, you know. He also understood Lyndon Baines Johnson, also. They were all part of the, you know, I mean, Lyndon Johnson was a formidable person and he just didn’t get it. He did not get it. I will not send, you know, American boys to fight things Vietnamese should do for themselves and—that’s bullshit when he’s escalating the war.

So, you know, it’s—the other thing that I would like to say is that even though I had this history of being a catalyst and doing many different things that changed things or created opportunities or institutions or organized or whatever you want to call it, but I liked seeing myself as a catalyst, this was a catalytic experience for me in that I was in a position of meeting people and becoming friends with all kinds of different people. Not different in their attitude towards the war necessarily, but different ages, different groups and wonderful people and they have been my friends the rest of my life. And I’m very grateful for that. And that the peace movement also was a place that really was an incubator for a lot of things.

Now the civil rights movement, and we were grateful for Humphrey and Johnson and their civil rights things that preceded 1968, but we still have a lot of work to do and we still do today and it’s fifty years later, but it gave energy to that. All of us sitting in the—many of us sitting in the McCarthy headquarters, 191 North Snelling Avenue [St. Paul, MN]—it was on a bus line and it was close to colleges. You could go to St. Thomas [University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN] or Macalester or St. Kate’s [St. Catherine University, St. Paul, MN] and show up—and if you’re with the university, you can take the bus and come over—we did have operations on campuses too.

But anyway, the women’s movement—a lot of us women, Marlene Johnson, you know, lots of people that were in the peace movement, Alpha, a lot of us, were the founders. Not Koryne Horbal [Koryne Kaneski Horbal (1937- )] – she loved Hubert Humphrey. She was a very strident—and Gerri Rasmussen—they were both Humphrey people to the core. But a lot of the rest of us weren’t and it’s made a difference.

And the environmental movement, I mean, it’s—I like to think 1968 was sort of a pointed of inflection or a fulcrum or the end of old white men rule power, that the power became more shared. We still have a way to go on that, especially on issues of race, gender, and class, but it was a turning point. And so, the ramifications of the Vietnam War have had many domestic ramifications. Some of them, I mean, I look at the homeless on our streets and I wonder how many of them are Vietnam vets.

I recently volunteered—there’s an organization that is rehabbing some old Anoka State Hospital for the Insane, as it used to be called—buildings for veterans. They’ve got one and I think they’re going to do at least one other, maybe three in total. They did one for men; one for women and I think they have—they’re going to work on some more. A lot of these people are working there because we owe it to our vets and they’re very patriotic and many of them voted for Trump [US President Donald John Trump (1946- )] I’m sure and have that world view. And I work with them and I don’t say anything but I’m happy to do it because I feel a certain moral responsibility to that generation of veterans, a strong one.

KH: I know we need to wrap up in a few minutes here but I do want to ask you—I feel like I’m taking you backwards a little bit but I want to make sure to ask you a little bit about Chicago and what your experience was at the National Democratic Convention.

MV: Well, my husband was part of the delegation. This was, you know, he always did the work. It was an extraordinary experience to be there, certainly something that I’ve never experienced before or since. There were clearly a group of people who wanted to make a statement through destruction. There was also—I mean, a number of people that my husband had represented in St. Paul had been victims of violence from police. A police riot was not a complete shock to us. It was a shock, yet at the same time it was really hard to know where all this was coming from in terms of—being in it was pretty scary. And, of course, the political ramifications of it—it gave the, you know, the police riot and the provocateurs, who were not part of the McCarthy group—they were way, way to the left of anything that we had to do—they weren’t part of our group, you know, they really gave the election to Richard Nixon.

KH: So where were you actually? Your husband was part of the delegation so you’re—

MV: Well, I’d be on the streets and be around and, you know, saw a lot of this stuff and was part of some of the stuff and it was scary. It gave me a different view of the country in a way, not that I—as I say—was completely shocked by the police riot or the extreme leftist provocateurs who just wanted—but it gave me a visceral connection to that kind of happening that I didn’t have before [bell rings]. The other ones were kind of distant and I learned something. I learned something.

But this whole experience was a learning experience for me. I learned from McCarthy about what the issues were, what some of the answers could possibly be. I learned how the political system works, what its strengths and weaknesses are. I learned—I met a lot of wise people in the peace movement. I was twenty-seven, you know, I connected with wise women who were older than I was—ten years older; fifteen years older. And they have helped shape who I am today and

I am grateful. I am pleased that I was part of this. I’m not one to say, I’m proud I did this, but I’m glad that I did it. I’m glad.

KH: What did you think about how the war ended? Do you remember what your thoughts or feelings were when it finally—at least the United States’ involvement?

MV: Yeah, I was going to say—a sense of relief and grief. There’s been a sense of grief since 1966, you know, it’s there. Two million people we killed. We hear about the fifty thousand American soldiers and there’s a grief around that. As a mother, how do you deal with that? How can you deal with that? I have three sons; I can’t imagine, can’t imagine. [spoken tearfully] Two million people we killed; a land we decimated, a beautiful country; a beautiful culture—the person that works right there is Hmong. [Points to a colleague’s work space.]

KH: That’s a whole other part of the story that so many people don’t know about. What—I’ll use this as one of my last questions as we wrap up and get you to your meeting.

MV: It’s okay. She will understand. It’s okay.

KH: What would you like people—and you may have answered this already in the course of the conversation, but what would you like people who might listen to or read this interview, or be part of this project, what would you like them to know about these years, the war or the peace movement? Or the McCarthy campaign or about him specifically?

MV: Well, yeah, I think I’ve said—I think that I want to remind people that we as citizens of the United States have a moral responsibility that goes beyond self-interest. We have to think in a larger context and that we have this responsibility to take moral positions when our country is wrong and that we have a political system that is subject to pressure if we do our part. And that it is very important to understand what the hell is going on and that when you have a leader like McCarthy who could explain it to us so that we know what is going on because it’s hard to know what is going on sometimes.

KH: Do you see any equivalents today to McCarthy? Anybody, any leader, politician or otherwise, who can explain?

MV: Well, I like Elizabeth Warren [Elizabeth Ann Warren (1949- )] very much because, you know, part of what we are facing today—obviously we are facing things in foreign policy that, you know, it’s sort of like when I travel, I don’t—I went to Greece last fall and when I came home I wanted to know if we had started World War III. I mean, we have enormous foreign policy challenges right now with our current administration but I think we also have this whole economic situation which is extraordinarily out of whack. It is not a just economic system that we have in this country and Elizabeth Warren steps forward and is like McCarthy in many ways, very articulate; very reasoned; fact-based.

KH: A relic of the past.

MV: You know, is a good speaker. It was very important to me that, as I say, the appeal to me to McCarthy was that he could rationally talk about some of these very irrational acts that our country was involved in. And Bobby Kennedy appealed to the visceral things which made him probably more electable, but we needed to know; we needed to know.

And I guess what I would say also is that currently we’re in a very bad situation in our country and I’m hoping that the young people in this country have an opportunity to really step forward, make the opportunity to step forward, because we need them to make the changes and we’re with them.

And then I was grateful; I’m seventy-seven years old and I was grateful for the elders that I met in the peace movement and I learned a lot from them and they learned a lot from me. I’m hoping that we as a country can do it again because we need to. We need to.

And then I’m excited about the possibility of having a much more multicultural approach to things. The peace movement had a number of very wonderful African-American leaders, Katie Watt and Reg Harris and a number of people that were wonderful. And, of course, Martin Luther King, couldn’t get much better than that. We’ve gotten more diverse since 1968 and I’m hoping that we can—that that diversity is represented in the change people that we need to be right now, all of us need to be. And we’re also dealing with a whole sector of our society who are frightened because they see change as being less rather than more.

KH: Yeah, I think that is it.

MV: And I hope we can persuade them otherwise, but—

KH: Is there anything else you want to get on tape here before we wrap it up?

MV: The power of the American people is quite wonderful and I think Gene McCarthy trusted that by stepping forward. We didn’t know where we were going but I think all of us thought that we could make a difference and I’m not so sure people feel that way right now but I think we can. We have to—the world has changed in fifty years. We have to figure out how to do it. What are the tools? I’m not sure all of that is very clear right now but we are seeing a lot of interest in political activity on—a lot of people didn’t vote in the last election—in 2016 and we’re seeing heightened interest so maybe that will work. I don’t know. But there are lessons—I do believe in looking at history and there are some lessons that we can’t be too discouraged. It’s hard not to be discouraged [rustling papers] but I don’t think we—we can’t give up—we have to be upbeat and we have to say, we can do it, because we can. But we can’t do it if we don’t think we can. And McCarthy said we could and we did.

KH: Thank you so much for doing this.

MV: Well, I’m glad that the historical society is interested in this part of our history. I think it’s a substantial part of—and thank you for interviewing me. I’m going to turn the light off and dash off.

KH: Sure, sure, you do what you must.

End of Interview